After banning the import of produce from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia has allowed Lebanese trucks loaded with tonnes of fruits and vegetables to enter its territory.
The head of the Beqaa Farmers Association, Ibrahim Tarshishi, told local media on Thursday that a decision was issued in Saudi Arabia a day prior, allowing the trucks that had reached the country’s border to go through.
The decision came a day after Tarshishi announced that around 1,000 tonnes of produce-loaded in trucks were stuck on the way to Saudi Arabia due to the import ban imposed on Sunday.
“The person who smuggles drugs abroad will not have difficulty forging the certificate of origin and forge the signature and seal,” Tarshishi said about the recent drug-pomegranate shipment to Saudi Arabia.
“From 5 years until today, more than 200 cars have been stopped while they were smuggling drugs out of Lebanon, including to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and others,” he revealed, adding that the incident caused the reaction it caused because the Saudi authorities had at that point become “fed up.”
A couple of days after Saudi Arabia‘s import ban took effect, the country’s ambassador to Lebanon, Walid Al-Bukhari, shared figures of the drug shipments caught by the Saudi authorities coming from Lebanon over the past year.
The total value of the drugs seized by Saudi Arabia from Lebanon over the said period is estimated to be around $1.1 billion.
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